He grew content himself, content with the rose-gray mornings, with the dignity of labor, with the pride of growing things. But even as he grew content, he knew he could not be content, that he must find the truth they had found and must carry that truth back to the wait- ing galaxy. Before long a ship would be coming out to explore the village and to study it and before the ship arrived he must know the answer; when the ship arrived he must be standing on the ridge above the village to tell them what he'd found.
One day Jed asked him, "You will be staying with us?"
David shook his head. "I have to go back, Jed. I would like to stay, but I must go back."
Jed spoke slowly, calmly. "You want the Truth? That's it?" "If you will give it to me," David said.
"It is yours to have," said Jed. "You will not take it back."
That night Jed said to his daughter, "Alice, teach David how to read our writing. It is time he knew."
In the corner by the fireplace the old lady sat rocking in her chair. "Aye," she said. "It is time he read the Truth."
IV
The key had come by special messenger from its custodian five valleys distant, and now Jed held it in his hand and slid it into the lock of the door in the building that stood in the center of the old, quiet, long-deserted village.
"This is the first time," Jed said, "that the door has been opened except for the ritualistic reading. Each hundred years the door is opened and the Truth is read so that those who are then living may know that it is so."
He turned the key and David heard the click of the tumblers turning in the lock.
"That way," said Jed, "we keep it actual fact. We do not allow it to become a myth.
"It is," he said, "too important a thing to become a myth."
Jed turned the latch and the door swung open just an inch or two.
"I said ritualistic reading," he said, "and perhaps that is not quite right. There is no ritual to it. Three persons are chosen and they come here on the appointed day and each of them reads the Truth and then they go back as living witnesses. There is no more ceremony than there is with you and me."
"It is good of you to do this for me," David said.
"We would do the same for any of our people who should doubt the Truth," said Jed. "We are a very simple people and we do not believe in red tape or rules. All we do is live.
"In just a little while," he said, "you will understand why we are simple people."
He swung the door wide open and stepped to one side so that
David might walk in ahead of him. The place was one large room and it was neat and orderly. There was some dust, but not very much.
Half the room was filled to three quarters of its height with a machine that gleamed in the dull light that came from some source high in the roof.
"This is our machine," said Jed.
And so it was gadgetry, after all. It was another machine, perhaps a cleverer and sleeker machine, but it was still a gadget and the human race were still gadgeteers.
"Doubtless you wondered why you found no machines," said Jed. "The answer is that there is only one, and this is it." "Just one machine!"
"It is an answerer," said Jed. "A logic. With this machine, there is no need of any others."
"You mean it answers questions?"
"It did at one time," said Jed. "I presume it still would if there were any of us who knew how to operate it. But there is no need of asking further questions."
"You can depend on it?" asked David. "That is, you can be sure that it tells the truth?"
"My son," Jed said soberly, "our ancestors spent thousands of years making sure that it would tell the truth. They did nothing else. It was not only the life work of each trained technician, but the life work of the race. And when they were sure that it would know and tell the truth, when they were certain that there could be no slightest error in the logic of its calculations, they asked two questions of it."
"Two questions?"
"Two questions," Jed said. "And they found the Truth." "And the Truth?"
"The Truth," Jed said, "is here for you to read. Just as it came out those centuries ago."
He led the way to a table that stood in front of one panel of the great machine. There were two tapes upon the table, lying side by side. The tapes were covered by some sort of transparent preservative.
"The first question," said Jed, "was this: `What is the purpose of the universe?' Now read the top tape, for that is the answer."
David bent above the table and the answer was upon the tape:
The universe has no purpose. The universe just happened.
"And the second question…" said Jed, but there was no need for him to finish, for what the question had been was implicit in the wording of the second tape:
Life has no significance. Life is an accident.
"And that," said Jed, "is the Truth we found. That is why we are a simple people."
David lifted stricken eyes and looked at Jed, the descendant of that mutant race that was to have brought power and glory, respect and dignity, to the gadgeteering humans.
"I am sorry, son," said Jed. "That is all there is."
They walked out of the room, and Jed locked the door and put the key into his pocket.
"They'll be coming soon," said Jed, "the ones who will be sent out to explore the village. I suppose you will be waiting for them?" David shook his head. "Let's go back home," he said.
The Thing in the Stone
1
He walked the hills and knew what the hills had seen through geologic time. He listened to the stars and spelled out what the stars were saying. He had found the creature that lay imprisoned in the stone. He had climbed the tree that in other days had been climbed by homing wildcats to reach the den gouged by time and weather out of the cliff's sheer face. He lived alone on a worn-out farm perched on a high and narrow ridge that overlooked the confluence of two rivers. And his next-door neighbor, a most ill-favored man, drove to the county seat, thirty miles away, to tell the sheriff that this reader of the hills, this listener to the stars was a chicken thief.
The sheriff dropped by within a week or so and walked across the yard to where the man was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch that faced the river hills. The sheriff came to a halt at the foot of the stairs that ran up to the porch.
'I'm Sheriff Harley Shepherd,' he said. 'I was just driving by. Been some years since I been out in this neck of the woods. You are new here, aren't you?'
The man rose to his feet and gestured at another chair. 'Been here three years or so,' he said. 'The name is Wallace Daniels. Come up and sit with me.'
The sheriff climbed the stairs and the two shook hands, then sat down in the chairs.
'You don't farm the place,' the sheriff said.
The weed-grown fields came up to the fence that hemmed in the yard.
Daniels shook his head. 'Subsistence farming, if you can call it that. A few chickens for eggs. A couple of cows for milk and butter. Some hogs for meat — the neighbors help me butcher. A garden of course, but that's about the story.'
'Just as well,' the sheriff said. 'The place is all played out. Old Amos Williams, he let it go to ruin. He never was no farmer.'
'The land is resting now,' said Daniels. 'Give it ten years — twenty might be better — and it will be ready once again. The only things it's good for now are the rabbits and the woodchucks and the meadow mice. A lot of birds, of course. I've got the finest covey of quail a man has ever seen.'